Thousands of Chinese-Canadians lured back to Hong Kong by better job prospects than Vancouver can offer

Chinese-Canadians lured back to Hong Kong by better job prospects

In the 1980s and early 1990s, in anticipation of their city reverting from British to Chinese control, thousands of wealthy Hong Kongers packed their bags — and their bank accounts — and moved across the Pacific to Vancouver. Hong Kongers forever changed the demographic mix of the Lower Mainland — and helped transform Vancouver into a shimmering Trans-Pacific hub. But now, according to a recent analysis by the South China Morning Post, so many Chinese-Canadians have returned to Hong Kong that Canadians are quite likely the city’s “most numerous foreign passport-holders.” The Post’s Tristin Hopper breaks down the reasons for the reverse migration — and examines the city they leave behind.

East leaves West
After analyzing recently released Canadian census data, the South China Morning Post reported on the weekend that Canada has seen an exodus of more than 65,000 Hong Kong residents in the past 15 years. Since the U.S., Australia and New Zealand do not seem to have welcomed any waves of Chinese-Canadians lately, the paper concluded it is “highly likely that the vast bulk of the 65,521 simply returned to Hong Kong.” Of course, hard numbers are difficult to come by, as Hong Kong does not recognize dual citizenship, according to the Morning Post.

“Hongcouver” is now “Mainland China-couver”
Vancouver is still a North American hub for Asian immigration — just not from Hong Kong. According to an April report by the Morning Post, Mainland Chinese arrivals in Vancouver “outstripped those from Hong Kong by 7,872 to 286 in 2012.” What’s more, while Hong Kongers trickled back over the Pacific in the late-1990s and 2000s, the number of Mainland Chinese in Vancouver jumped an incredible 88%.

The Hong Kongers killed Chinatown and left a Glass City
Vancouver’s nickname as the “Glass City” may never have come to pass without the Hong Kong handover. Hong Kong money and Hong Kong developers were a key factor behind the forest of glass condo developments that now dominate the city’s waterfront. At the same time, a rapid influx of wealthy Chinese “desegregated” the city, according to one study by the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia. Ethnic Chinese people are now strongly represented in almost every Metro Vancouver community.

They also heralded the “New Chinese”
Chinese people have been coming to British Columbia since the time of Captain George Vancouver himself, but they typically took their first steps on Canadian soil as poor fishermen or railroad workers. The Hong Kong Chinese, by contrast, arrived with money and influence. “The Hong Kong immigrants were really a new kind of Canadian … they expected to be first-class citizens, they wanted to live in the best neighbourhoods, wanted the best schools for their kids,” Henry Yu, a history professor at the University of British Columbia, told Postmedia News in 2007. Of course, the New Chinese also brought a tsunami of real estate investment that has also helped make Vancouver the world’s second-most unaffordable real estate market in the English-speaking world. The No. 1 spot? Hong Kong.

It turns out Chinese-run Hong Kong isn’t as bad as feared
Pre-1997, many assumed that once the People’s Republic of China took control, once-prosperous Hong Kong would be winnowed by communist economic policy. Instead, the opposite happened: With an eye to matching Hong Kong’s wealth on a grand scale, the Chinese Communist Party adopted Hong Kong’s laissez-faire economics as a national policy. Almost as soon as Hong Kongers could see that Red China did not intend to screw everything up, migration rates to Canada began to plummet.

Many may never have intended to stay
Metropolis, a federal government-funded immigration research body, has published numerous reports that Hong Kongers, along with many Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese, coveted Canadian citizenship but never intended to stay permanently. Some even referred to their mandatory passport-qualifying three-year residency as “immigration prison.”

Besides, Hong Kong pays better, and it’s closer to mom
While acknowledging that “citizenship acquisition is a key motivation” for Hong Kong-to-Canada transplants, Simon Fraser University researcher Nuowen Dang also provided a battery of enticing reasons to return to the Pearl of the Orient: “Higher-paying jobs, greater job security, job promotion opportunities and family reunification.”

Canada could be only one Tiananmen Square away from a “mass emergency crunch”
Since many of Canada’s Hong Kong out-migrants hold dual citizenship, any large-scale political unrest could send thousands of Hong Kongers flooding back into Canada overnight. “If it goes badly between China and Hong Kong, you would see an extraordinary number of Hong Kong returnees [suddenly eligible for Canadian support services]. It’s an economic vulnerability for the country,” Vancouver lawyer Richard Kurland, editor-in-chief of a widely read publication on immigration policy, told the Vancouver Sun last month.